If you work in PR, you might have heard the name Olivia Brown being bandied around this week.
If you don’t, you will be wondering who she is.
Well, according to ChatGPT: “Olivia Brown” most commonly refers to Olivia Margarette Brown, an American actress known for television and film roles.
Fair enough. But that’s not the one we’re after. Ironically, given it’s flown under ChatGPT’s radar, the Olivia Brown making headlines this week is an AI agent.
Press Gazette reported on Tuesday (7th October) that SEO and PR agency Search Intelligence Ltd has launched a tool called Olivia Brown that produces “AI-written content that is seriously undermining the credibility of UK publishers”.
Here’s the piece in full, which warrants a read: Automated PR tool is bombarding UK media with AI-generated content
Undermining the PR profession
At a glance, you could readily dismiss this news as unremarkable. Like every industry, PR has seen a huge spike in AI usage, from the casual use of mainstream conversational AI chatbots, through to the emergence of specialised AI tools – for copywriting, media monitoring and analytics, and more – for PR teams. That new AI solutions are being deployed that automate and take over more elements of a PR professional’s day-to-day responsibilities is not surprising.
But Press Gazette’s story underlines an important difference: “The tool appears to invert the traditional PR process, which normally starts with a story and then looks for publishers willing to cover it. Olivia Brown uses AI to invent press releases designed to chime with the existing output of target publications – even down to creating expert quotes.”
Alastair McCapra, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, was unequivocal in his assessment, stating that tools like Olivia Brown “risk undermining the very foundations of the profession”.
When AI goes too far
The concern here is in the clumsy and yet somewhat ruthless of application of AI. First given the prompt of an organisation’s website, Olivia Brown is set to work. It scans the media, generates hundreds of ideas for potential commentary opportunities or press releases, drafts the preferred options (including making up quotes for spokespeople), sends the content to hundreds of journalists who have written on similar topics before, and then automatically follows up with those journalists if they do not reply.
There are so many notable concerns. Three that immediately spring to mind:
1. AI makes mistakes, and lots of them. Anyone who uses AI regularly knows that, while hugely valuable, it cannot be trusted blindly. One of the most common issues I encounter is AI’s propensity to makeup information to plug gaps in its knowledge; something that could be problematic if relying on AI to generate high volumes of press releases on potentially niche subjects.
2. Relying on a website alone is a terrible idea if you want to properly learn about an organisation and what digital PR they need. The content is often out-dated and will only scratch the surface in explaining their specialisms, values and culture, not to mention the backgrounds of the senior leadership team, their tone of voice and the industry issues that matter to them. So, the AI likely to be misaligned in what it says and how it says it.
3. And stating the obvious, under no circumstances should you email hundreds of journalists and then follow up with them all again shortly after when they don’t respond, especially if they have never heard of you nor the organisation (or individual) you are pitching on behalf of. It’s PR 101 – doing more and moving faster is not always best, and this is a classic case where just because tech can do something does not mean that it should.
McCapra sums it up very neatly: “Instant automation of PR responses may seem efficient, but it risks undermining the very foundations of the profession. Communication is about judgement, relevance, and trust, the qualities that make media relations meaningful. When responsibility is surrendered to automated tools, accountability slips away, and with it the public’s confidence in the entire profession.”
There’s not always a short cut
We’re all on a journey with AI. As with the proliferation of any new technology, there are early and late adopters, those who use it conservatively and those who go all in, and there will always be some who push the line, bordering on reckless in their use of a fancy new tool.
Aside from the three practical concerns noted above, the fundamental issue I have with Olivia Brown is that it seems to flip proper PR upside down in the pursuit of coverage for coverage’s sake. It has echoes of when firms pay for coverage with backlinks in it like an SEO cheat code – or those digital marketing agencies who would pester journalists to add backlinks wherever an organisation is mentioned.
Ultimately, there are serious risks here; where there could be no real strategy when it comes to building brand awareness and credibility; there could be no careful thought to what topics a brand should talk about and what its stance on those topics should be; there could be no in-depth human insight and expertise to add genuine value to the content. If we use AI to cut corners and remove human input, PR is devalued, becoming a case of throwing as many chunks of crap as possible against the wall and seeing what sticks. Only here, the wall is a journalist’s inbox, and the crap is AI-generated content (potentially littered with mistakes) that could find its way into the media (there has been an uptick in erroneous, AI-generated content being used by unsuspecting journalists).
I have absolutely no doubt that AI will become more and more integral in PR over the coming months and years. Olivia Brown will be a part of that as it becomes more sophisticated and, crucially, as the correct balance is struck between AI automations and human input. For now, it poses some serious questions for the PR industry to ponder.
We’ll see many more stories like the one that appeared in Press Gazette this week. Knowing where to draw the line between what AI can do for us and what it should do for us – both from a technical and ethical perspective – is going to be the key. And that line will constantly move as the technology and our use of it evolves; the safe bet is that ‘how to leverage AI in PR’ will be the topic dominating industry chatter for a long time to come.
